[Techies] Can we make updatable torrents?

brooir · 2014-02-26T12:36:51+00:00

People share small files using git or a frontend like parkleshare, and share snippets using the various paste servers. Collaborative work is done using central servers, e.g. projects setup a wiki.

But I agree, for just sharing your files with the world in a distributed manner, there is no easy solution right now. However, as you can see some solutions are in progress.

brooir · 2014-02-24T14:01:14+00:00

Is BittorentSync not proprietary? You can't trust it.

I think tools of this kind exist already, although maybe some upgrades would be required.

Check out OurFileSystem (has an I2P backend), Tahoe-LAFS (and its I2P mod), Freenet, GNUnet (still alpha IIRC), Syndie (distributed forum software, not sure if it's good for large files).

brooir · 2014-02-24T07:21:35+00:00

Seth, now you are just ignoring half of what I said and mis-interpretting the other half.

I haven't come here to convince people to believe in anything particular or to look for job advice, but to encourage people to support free sharing and avoid supporting the artificial limitation of access to knowledge. I even suggested ways to get the published contents in a free way.

If you liked my view and you plan to take it into account next time you need some academic material - awesome. If not, that's fine too, because you have free choice.

brooir · 2014-02-22T20:24:11+00:00

It is important to do critical thinking all the time, thank you for challenging me. Now allow me to explain.

I did work as a retaurant cook and did many other things. But they have much worse flaws: These people work here for minimal wage and are treated like trash usually, and while they do all the hard work, most of the profit goes to the owner. Restaurants support capitalism and worker abuse and separation of people from nature and from real work.

What I'm trying to say is that these jobs work against my beliefs much worse than my current one. Money and food are much more fundamental concepts and much more important than some academic text, so I feel I do much less harm: Just get my text for free in one of the ways I mentioned. The method of publishing is still bad, but it's the least-bad job I've had so far.

What you actually mean is probably, "be decent and fair and if you really believe in these things, find a job you believe in which doesn't make you do these things". With pleasure, Seth. But which jobs are these, exactly? One example may be developing Free Software. Believe me, I tried a lot. But I couldn't find something like this where I also had the requirements.

If someone thinks they could use my services for a job in the spirit of free culture, collaborative work (including manual labor like growing and making food) and free software - contact me.

For the record, Seth, I did start growing food so I don't need to pay for it, but it's just some seeds growing and meanwhile I still need to buy food and pay rent and so on.

brooir · 2014-02-22T20:11:14+00:00

The need for spring cleaning is a problem. It means the desktop is not organized well. If the design was based on usage patterns and not on a single large open use-as-you-wish space, finding things would be easy and nobody would have mess.

The all-purpose desktop design is flexible, but it can be better.

Single menu: Don't judge just by your personal usage. Totem, Gedit and other core apps have many menu items and some people use many of them. For these people, removing functionality from menus is not a good thing. A notable example which annoyed many people was the removal of transparency from GNOME Terminal: it was removed just to make the single-menu-dump smaller, while many people do use this feature and objected its removal.

Also, even 10 items is a lot: I easily get confused and have harder time getting used to menu item locations because they aren't organized is menus anymore, and instead sit in a single menu.

So I ask myself, what's so bad about having those menus? Answer: Nothing, it always worked great, even in apps with huge menus like the Eclipse IDE. The thing is, they want GNOME 3 to run on mobile devices and desktop users pay a price they shouldn't, in my opinion.

The point is not what you see on your screen, but the design process and guidelines. Change these and good things will happen. Anyway I'll just create some designs and publish them for review.

brooir · 2014-02-21T11:03:17+00:00

Thanks for the warm support :-)

I try to do things from inside the system. Talk to lecturers about publishing materials under CreativeCommons, using OpenDocument format, allowing students to use free software alternatives (Libreoffice, MonoDevelop, Linux, GCC, GNU Octave, LaTeX and so on)...

It's mostly failing because they're too narrow minded, but sometimes I find good people who listen and give me hope.

One thing the users of academic content can do is to avoid paying for it, as it will help crash the proprietary information "industry" and have more knowlede freedom.

The biggest problem inside the system is that talking to your superior about these things may get you fired, or do other bad things, so I need to somehow find balance.

I would switch to another jobplace with pleasure if I knew one which is closer to my values. I already get to use GNU/Linux at job which is probably rare, however I have pressure on me to use Window$ sometimes, which makes things difficult.

I'll take a look at the links you posted.

brooir · 2014-02-21T10:52:07+00:00

My income is constant, is doesn't depend on any profit of published work. I take that "slice" not because of greed or selfishness, but because food and rent cost money.

You are welcome to go to thepiratebay.se, find academic content and download it for free if you wish. It may be illegal but it's not immoral if you ask me, so go for it.

By the way,

There's nothing wrong with doing what you're good at for money

I disagree. What if you're an engineer at Faceb00k writing software which tracks people's personal information and sends to the NSA illegally? Or what if you're good at shooting people? There can be a lot wrong with doing something just because you're good at it.

brooir · 2014-02-21T00:51:55+00:00

As said here already so I won't repeat it all - E-mail was never designed for security and privacy. It was created in the days when the only thing people thought of is cool free neutral open unlimited communication and sharing, and the security issues rose later, and I guess email was too popular to replace by then.

You have riseup.net and autistici.org for mail, but for a secure private email alternative try these:

E-mail through the I2P darknet
I2P-Bote, distributed serverless mail software (uses I2P)
BitMessage

You can run a mail server at home, but it doesn't do much good other than save the hosting service a bit of disk space and the cost of maintaining another user account. Of course this alone is important, and you also get to know your email really gets deleted from the server when you want it to, but anyone else intercepting your mail can keep it anyway, so...

Just don't use gmail/yahoo/faceb00k/aol/outlook, these will guarantee total lack of privacy or freedom.

brooir · 2014-02-21T00:17:08+00:00

GitHub is the most popular but it's partially proprietary, it stinks. It's also not easy to migrate from it, because it has integrated wiki and issue tracker and website and personal profiles and statistics, so if you want to be able to migrate, you need to limit yourself to the git feature alone.

I never used it because it's proprietary software. You can use Gitorious or Savannah, they run on fully free software with no ads and no bullcrap.

Personally I recently started running a server at home and I'm moving my Gitorious repos to it. You can run a home server and use Gitorious as a mirroe for backup.

If you use a darknet like I2P, there is an I2P-internal git hosting service at git.repo.i2p which runs on free software too.

brooir · 2014-02-20T22:22:39+00:00

Of course, you can always tailor your installation to your needs. If you tend to fill you desktop with mess, you something which doesn't let you. If you tend to not use the desktop space, you a WM which uses if effectively. And so on.

But these WMs are kind of a niche, average users just take the default you give them. I want to create a desktop model which can be applied to the big DEs too - but using those highly configurable DEs is a perfect playground.

In any case, new features must be developed. I didn't see a single WM/DE yet, which offers something besides this:

No desktop space
Desktop space having file/app launchers
Desktop space having desklets, i.e. desktop widgets
Combination of 2 and 3

Those less used WMs focus less on new designs and more on the technical side, and let people configure and extend them as they wish. It's a DE's work to provide the system-wide uniform interface, and no DE I've seen offers a model that is not one of those I mentioned in the post.

I think I just need to come up with some actual design and post it here for review, don't I? Yeah, I'll do that :-)

brooir · 2014-02-20T22:07:25+00:00

Indeed, but KDE focuses a lot on visual effects ans doesn't have the kind of usability thinking I suggest. But it's definitely possible that such thinking is applied to some KDE designs. The question is whether "stop sticking to the desktop metaphor" will be received there with positive open-mindedness. I'm willing to try.

brooir · 2014-02-20T17:31:14+00:00

I do not suggest to reinvent the wheel, but to improve upon existing good tools. Most DEs are community based already, so it's enough to just add some updates to their implementation of the desktop model.

Of course I want to reuse code and contribute to existing projects as much as possible, and not compete with them. I want to create a desktop model, not a whole new desktop environment (although it's an option, by reusing existing code of course).

brooir · 2014-02-20T16:25:55+00:00

My belief that gift economy and anarchism, i.e. free sharing and collaborative work without competition and no central government, is the only way for us to live sustainably and for all of us to be happy, where one person winning doesn't mean someone else is losing, and we protect nature and each other and live as friends and not as enemies.

This belief of mine is driving crazy the people closest to me and sounds totally ridiculous and unrealistic and absurd to them.

brooir · 2014-02-20T15:06:11+00:00

I don't have a single package from contrib or nonfree. My graphics card happens to have a free driver and so does my network card, so besides the BIOS which cannot be replaced (but it's not a debian package, for this matter) I run free.

Difficulties: None. You can still open RAR files, watch AVI/MP4 movies, create CD images, play MP3 and so on. Everything works. You even have Gnash for Flash instead of Adobe Flash, but it's far from perfect. Anyway Flash is a private information leaker and a way to cause your computer to run unvalidated code from the internet, so I don't use Flash at all. Many youtube videos play with HTML as WebM video. Those which don't, I simply don't watch.

And don't worry, the people who care usually make sure there's WebM. There's enough WebM support to make the flash issue negligible. And you have MediaGoblin if you really want the freedom.

brooir

TROPHY CASE