Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one
Joined Aug 2019
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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Hans-Christoph Steiner
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@sergii yes, that is one case. If you read the whole article, you'll also see that some soldiers are calling the hotline from Russia before they've even made it to Ukraine.
Imagine if there was a billion in aid to #Ukraine to convince more Russian soldiers to desert. #NonViolent tactics like this are effective, and are much cheaper and vastly less destructive than the many 10s of billions in military aid that is flowing there.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/26/ukraine-hotline-encouraging-russians-to-surrender
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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The Eclipse Foundation has studied the Cyber Resilience Act and is very worried about the implications for open source foundations.
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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The DEA issued me a glomar answer in response to my FOIA request on whether they acquired phone hacking tech Graphite from Paragon.
Even though the NYTimes reported the DEA acquired the phone hacking tech.
https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/paragongraphite-137633/?
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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Hans-Christoph Steiner
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Spent half a day on 6 lines of code. 
Why is web-development always a major pita? 
Anyway when this gets deployed it might finally become possible to share links to apps on #FDroid here, without #mastodon getting all confused and rendering wrong previews.
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroid-website/-/merge_requests/899
@travisfw @fdroidorg it is still an open question who that funding will go to, as far as I know, the default for EU Pilot Projects is to do them internally.
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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#FDroid in an #EU "Pilot project — De-monopolized access to EU applications"... "The focus of the pilot project includes EU institutions releasing their apps on existing alternative app stores, including f-droid that aims at promoting apps released under open source licenses"
https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-14783-2022-ADD-5/en/pdf
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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Bits from the release team: #bookworm freeze started https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/01/msg00004.html
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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Hans-Christoph Steiner
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Those who follow me on The Bad Place have heard me repeat this a thousand times, But once more won't hurt.
Election security is incredibly complex, full of seemingly impossible tradeoffs. But disinformation about supposed "rigged" elections is perhaps the most serious threat to election integrity today,
The best defense is to learn how elections actualy work! Becoming a poll worker is a great way to do that
Also, this National Academies study is a terrific resource:
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/25120/securing-the-vote-protecting-american-democracy
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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@fdroidorg To be a little more specific. Non-free (aka proprietary, aka the opposite of free and open source) software is not allowed on the official f-droid.org reposiory. Most trackers are non-free. That's why they violate our policies and have to be removed, or they would prevent and app from being published. FOSS trackers are allowed, but will be tagged with the tracking anti-feature warning. However, those seem to be rather rare.
Recommendation engines based on tracking individual users' behavior will always be dangerous. They are fatally flawed and not beneficial to humanity, even if they are free software and publicly audited. They inevitably result in someone invisibly controlling many others as they are in the process of thinking. That said, they will always be with us, so we must push for regulation of how they are used. The standard #Mastodon experience does not use such algorithms, but they are coming soon.
This level of vigilance is hard, so we have added another layer of defense in the upcoming #FDroid client v1.16 release, currently in beta. We've moved the database to be based on #Room and its built-in #security measures, then had that new code audited https://f-droid.org/2022/12/22/third-audit-results.html 2/2
If you want to see a real world attempt at adding a #SQL #injection #vulnerability to an #Android app via merge request, take a look at https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/merge_requests/889#note_506478642 1/2
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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The Twitter API lockout of third-party apps is only the latest reminder of centralization's most important rule: The platform owner has the right to capriciously wreck the businesses of people who accepted the platform's invitation to run a business on the platform.
I just remembered a wonderful feature in #Android that has been broken by #security features: it used to be possible to do a parallel install of GNU/Linux on Android devices. #SecureBoot features are of course important, but they do come at a cost. Android's #VerifiedBoot does have some nice properties that make the devices pretty resilient. It is equally important to recognize that security is not the goal, but part of the process. A brick will always be more secure than any computing device.
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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#DRM isn't just an annoyance -- it's a violation of your right to use the items you own as you see fit. Learn more about our Defective by Design campaign at http://defectivebydesign.org, and follow our campaign account at @endDRM
Joined Aug 2019
