Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one
- Personal Site
- https://kylerank.in
- Personal Bibliography
- https://kylerank.in/writing.html
Admin
Technical author, FOSS advocate, public speaker, Linux security & infrastructure geek, author of The Best of Hack and /: Linux Admin Crash Course, Linux Hardening in Hostile Networks and many other books, ex-Linux Journal columnist.
Joined Apr 2019
I was inspired to expand this into a full article to give myself a bit more space to talk about the issues:
https://puri.sm/posts/the-general-purpose-computer-in-your-pocket/
I was planning to grow out some stubble as part of my Halloween pirate costume. My son informed me (a bit too late) that he would prefer it be a full beard, so I'm going as Sparsebeard.
Kyle Rankin
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❌ NSA analysts spied on significant others.
❌ Ring employees were caught looking at off-limits footage.
❌ Verkada staff use their own facial recognition tech to harass other employees.
Abuse of dangerous tech often starts with the people who build it. https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdyqm/surveillance-startup-used-own-cameras-to-harass-coworkers
Kyle Rankin
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Microsoft got in antitrust trouble for bundling IE for free w/ Windows to compete with Netscape.
Now imagine Microsoft controlled whether Netscape could be installed or updated on Windows, and blocked them, and you are closer to the current situation with phones.
One of the neatest tricks Big Tech ever pulled was convincing people that phones weren't general-purpose computers and should have different rules than laptops or desktops. These rules conveniently give the vendor more control.
Now these rules are moving to laptops and desktops.
Kyle Rankin
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@kyle cheers to that - the 'freedom' part is exactly why I've supported @purism with my orders this year, and why every project I've worked on in 2020 is #GPL or #MIT licensed.
I guess I did release my vim config as #unlicense "code" but... yeah
It's been long enough now that we are back to the pre-golden era world where people don't understand the risks of vendor lock-in and proprietary protocols. To me this means there's an opportunity for a new golden era, if we can get people to appreciate why the "freedom" part of FOSS is so important.
The following era saw priority shift from "freedom" to "open" throughout FOSS. Linux webapp development was primarily done on Macs and that changed how FOSS development happened overall, as devs had to adapt to homebrew libraries instead of curated packages. Dev tools changed to solve the problem of inconsistent library versions between Mac and Linux distros, which ultimately led to docker. I believe the primary reason docker was created was to serve Linux webapp development on OSX.
I'd love to see a history of FOSS in its "golden era" (early aughts) to the early teens. There was this great momentum at the time, giant advances in the Linux desktop and server, and a large focus worldwide on open standards (XMPP became, briefly, the standard chat protocol).
This progress stalled. My theory is that it's in large part due to OSX convincing FOSS developers "it's UNIX" and with FOSS devs on Macs, Linux desktop advances slowed down.
Kyle Rankin
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More than 2,000 law enforcement agencies across every state now have access to technology that allows them to extract data from confiscated phones.
A new report by @TeamUpturn details the dangerous growth of these tools: https://www.upturn.org/reports/2020/mass-extraction/
Kyle Rankin
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New Episode! This week,
Doc Searls, @katherined, Petros Koutoupis, and @kyle talk Amazon drones, #adtech, The Social Dilemma, and more. https://reality2cast.com/42 #podcast #technology #privacy #surveillancecapitalism #newepisode
Kyle Rankin
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Librem 5 phone + USB keyboard + USB touchpad + Bluetooth speaker + HDMI screen + Firefox + YouTube video
Kyle Rankin
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New Episode! Who controls your phone? Doc Searls, @katherined
@kyle and
Petros Koutoupis talk TikTok, censorship, user sovereignty and more. #podcast #newepisode #security #privacy #technology Episode link: https://reality2cast.com/41
Kyle Rankin
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#osk-sdl unlocking a LUKS rootfs running PureOS on the #purism #librem5 devkit.
osk-sdl is an initramfs touchscreen keyboard made originally for postmarketOS, for unlocking a LUKS rootfs on touchscreen devices with no physical keyboards.
The long unlocking time is due to the rootfs being encrypted on a big core desktop system (see `man 8 cryptsetup` /--iter-time)
“I’d be more worried about the camera on your phone than I would be about a drone,” #whynotboth #privacy https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/25/21455197/amazon-ring-drone-home-security-surveillance-sidewalk-halo-privacy
Kyle Rankin
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@amosbatto @purism I'm pretty sure now that we can drive 4K UHD with the #Librem5:
Kyle Rankin
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It does make me feel good to know that all the articles I wrote for @linuxjournal since 2008 (I just checked my bibliography on https://kylerank.in/writing.html, I'm a few articles shy of 200) will still be around. I still refer back to them from time to time.
Whoa, it looks like Linux Journal is back (again again):
- Personal Site
- https://kylerank.in
- Personal Bibliography
- https://kylerank.in/writing.html
Admin
Technical author, FOSS advocate, public speaker, Linux security & infrastructure geek, author of The Best of Hack and /: Linux Admin Crash Course, Linux Hardening in Hostile Networks and many other books, ex-Linux Journal columnist.
Joined Apr 2019
