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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Square Singer@feddit.detolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldBackdoors
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    3 months ago

    The only real downside on the open source side is that the fix is also public, and thus the recipe how to exploit the backdoor.

    If there’s a massive CVE on a closed source system, you get a super high-level description of the issue and that’s it.

    If there’s one on an open source system, you get ready-made “proof of concepts” on github that any script kiddy can exploit.

    And since not every software can be updated instantly, you are left with millions of vulnerable servers/PCs and a lot of happy script kiddies.

    See, for example, Log4Shell.



  • Tbh, I don’t recommend beginners to try out multiple distros in the beginning. Realistically, if you don’t have in depth Linux knowledge already, all you’ll be able to differentiate is the look of the DE and the wallpaper.

    I find, too much choice tends to confuse beginners more than it helps them.

    So I’d rather recommend something simple like Ubuntu and let them try out the flavours with the different DEs.

    Choice is better for later when people actually understand what they are looking for.



  • A squadron of military planes is a bit hard to come by as a private person.

    But I wonder if people would also be that fascinated after 25+ years if I flew some DJI drones at 1-2km height in the night with bright LEDs on their bottom and dropped some pyrotechnics from them.

    This has been confirmed independently multiple times as two groups of A-10 military aircraft dropping flares with parachutes for training purposes.

    And still you see videos titled “Still no answers 26 years after the lights appeared over the valley”. Well, no answer that these guys want to hear.

    And what it looked like is quite easy to check, since there are tons of photographs of that incident.



  • Yeah, that’s more due to need than due to technical difficulty.

    Even in 2024 it’s still common that you have to print out documents to sign them or tickets for some event or something like that. All these (quite relevant) use cases just don’t work if you don’t have a 2D printer.

    As much as I like my 3D printer, and as much as I recommend everyone to have one, is not nearly as necessary.

    In regards to how difficult they are to make, consider the price.

    2D printers have an advantage due to their much higher sales numbers (economy of scale) and they are subsidized by the manufacturer selling expensive ink. And still, a half-decent inkjet costs €100 or more, and a color laser easily costs €300 or more.

    3D printers usually have much lower sales numbers and people usually buy 3rd party filament, so the printer needs to be expensive enough to generate money for the manufacturer. And still you can get a decent Ender 3 for as low as €150.


  • What’s different? Basically the whole thing.

    A 3D printer (talking here about FDM because SLA really shares nothing at all with a 2D printer) is basically a tiny hot glue gun being moved on three axies by stepper motors. Of course, the temperature and extrusion controls are much more accurate than a hot glue gun, but that’s the basic principle. You got a single “printing point” that gets moved around and it only extrudes filament from that single point.

    An inkjet printer has one stepper motor that moves the paper and another that moves the print head from left to right. So there too are axies moved on stepper motors. A very simple trait also shared by e.g. CD and disk drives, slot machines, camera lenses and many other things. All these things are as close to a 2D printer as a 3D printer.

    The real magic of an inkjet printer is the print head. A print head doesn’t have a single nozzle but an array of many nozzles. This way, a printer cannot only print one dot at a time, but instead a few lines at a time. These nozzles are much tinier that the nozzles on a 3D printer, and they also are much more complicated to operate.

    A 3D printer just uses a stepper motor to push filament into the printhead, where it melts and is then pushed out of a hole.

    On an inkjet printer, you need to either rapidly boil the ink, so that a single vapor bubble appears that pushes just a tiny drop of ink on the paper, or you have a tiny piezoelectric transducer that creats a vibration that then pushes out ink.

    This is orders of magnitude more difficult than a 3D printer, and much tinier. You won’t be DIYing a working 2D printer from scratch, while that isn’t all that hard for a 3D printer. With access to a decent toolshop, you can make all relevant parts of a 3D printer. The same is not true for 2D printers.

    To rephrase your question: Why is it that so many people build DIY desktop PCs, but nobody is making a DIY flagship smartphone? What’s the difference?

    Basically everything.


  • And the FOSS system seems to be collapsing right now for the same reason that anarcho-communism only works short-term until someone sees commercial value in it and abuses the system to the limit.

    • Big corporations initially providing exceptional services based on FOSS and after a while use their market share to excert undue control about the system (see e.g. RedHat, Ubuntu, Chrome, Android, …)
    • Big corporations taking FLOSS, rebranding it and hiding it below their frontend, so that nobody can interact with or directly use the FLOSS part (e.g. iOS, any car manufacturer, …)
    • Big and small companies just using GPL (or similar) software and not sharing their modifications when asked (e.g. basically any embedded systems, many Android manufacturers, RedHat, …)
    • Big corporations using infrastructure FOSS without giving anything back (e.g. OpenSSL, which before Heartbleed was developed and maintained by a single guy with barely enough funding to stay alive, while it was used by millions of projects with a combined user base of billions of users)

    The old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook is everywhere.

    And so it’s no surprise that many well-known FOSS developers are advocating for some kind of post-FOSS system that forces commercial users to pay for their usage of the software.

    Considering how borderline impossible it is for some software developer to successfully sue a company to comply with GPL, I can’t really see such a post-FOSS system work well.