Yes, an exploitative thing that mostly consists of free labour for big orgs.

Our starting point for design is longevity, which means making our devices more repairable, a very different approach to the electronics industry standard. To support maximum longevity and because of the IP rating, Fairphone 4 does not feature a headphone jack. In the end, it comes down to how we make a product that lasts for at least five years. We needed to eliminate as many vulnerabilities as possible, and the headphone jack is subject to dust and water ingress over time.

Again, you might disagree, you might know better, I don’t know. But this is their motivation when it comes to longevity and hence sustainability. To me, it seems a reasonable idea: if the jack helps reducing the consumption of batteries in headphones but decreases the lifespan of the phones, it seems a bad tradeoff.

They have literally an explanation for this on their website. You might disagree, but saying “it makes no sense”…makes no sense.

Also, they discontinued the earbuds and still no jack on FP5, so the idea that “they wanted to sell their own buds” doesn’t seem to be likely.

Of course, but I assume elderly people getting familiar with a completely new technology need anyway some kind of personal support and introduction from someone close. I don’t think anybody would plan to throw a Mac at some elderly person and say “if any issue call Apple support”, right?

I get your point though, and I am just saying that there are situations where Linux might work totally fine.

Also, the used market for apple product is not that big where I lived. Nobody in the family had a Mac also, which means she wouldn’t have had anybody to ask for support at all. It’s a specific situation, but my point is that having an official support is not going to help that much in some cases.

I find Mac to be extremely unintuitive in how things are organized tbh, but that’s just me.

Anyway, you are right, but she wanted to spend just 3-400 euros for a laptop, which is incompatible with Apple prices. Obviously this means being there to support if something goes wrong, but with a minimal install and Linux being stable, it doesn’t happen often (I also have my mom’s laptop running mint). I do have a reverse tunnel script configured that allows me to SSH in their machines using a “panic” icon on their desktop.

My great-aunt asked for a PC when she was 85 and her grandchild moved abroad. I installed Linux mint with a few scripts and shortcuts to ease her life, and she picked that up (check email, Skype, nothing super sophisticated ofc). I guess if it’s a new thing, windows does not the advantage of being already familiar, and Linux is more stable in my experience, which leads to less random errors.

Yes, it is a metasearch engine. It’s basically like proxy+aggregator or multiple engines.

They are using brave search results, like they do with others. Frankly, you could build totally identical arguments (and to be honest, much more serious) for “partnering” with Google and Microsoft, but then the product wouldn’t exist and wouldn’t be as good.

The relationship with the Brave founder is so indirect, that this - to me - feels like an argument from someone who is looking for reasons to get angry. Kagi probably uses AWS (or other clouds), which funds Amazon (known for terrible worker rights), funds Google, fossil fuel industry, etc. It’s a sad reality, but you simply can’t exist nowadays in the moral and ethical way many people would like. You can, only if you are a privileged one. Technologically speaking, Google can probably do it, for example (own hardware, DCs, tech etc.). We can choose to fight those that directly support political agendas we disagree with, or we can damage the smallest players by demanding they will be 100% pure and ethical by not having any relationship with those with those agendas.

In my personal opinion, such unrealistic ethical requirements end up being a reactionary choice as they will ultimately impede new - better - players to emerge and will leave the existing - worse - dominating.

This is pure rhetoric, I can flip the argument:

“You care more about the gender than about my material condition.”

Also, the moment I need to let prevail abstract concepts over my material condition (i.e., caring about “my group” being over represented while I am out of a job) is the moment in which the class unity is broken. Me and those women who are out of a job have so much in common that there is no reason for me to consider us part of two separate groups. That’s the whole point of my argument, I advocate for worker solidarity and I absolutely feel that this attitude is overall harmful for it.

But it is an asshole move to show up to an event meant for one group of people when the original issue is how over represented your group is. I’m a developer. The grind sucks. But I would be an asshole to show up to this.

If I was out of job, I would honestly care less about the fact that “my group” is over represented. There is no white male lobby that pays my mortgage. That said, I - as in the actual me - would not go to such event either, but that’s also because I wouldn’t go to any job fair atm since I don’t need a job.

Problem for what?

I exist, I need a job to live, I have job, I try my best not to be an asshole, I fight (and vote) for a better society, for social and civil rights.

Why exactly I - since I am a man I feel included in your statement - should be THE problem?

Gender is absolutely not the only nor the most important discriminating factor in tech. Being a foreigner and, probably most commonly, being old is an extreme disadvantage in tech. Similarly, a woman coming from a wealthy family might be a privileged compared to a man coming from a poor background (which translates into lower access to education, resources, etc.).

Look at the video in the article, and tell me you don’t notice some commonalities among the men in the queues.

I see mostly foreigners, who most likely have no network of support, and need a job to maintain a VISA before getting kicked out of the country. Are they in a better or worse position compared to a local woman? Does it even make sense to start asking these questions?

I want to challenge this vision where discriminations are only looked at through the lens of gender division. This is shortsighted because discrimination on the workplace is extremely diverse and it exists for the benefit of those same sponsors of this event.

How dare workers in (potentially desperate?) need of a job to look for jobs. They are men and belonging to that category automatically makes them rich and privileged. The working class should be united against common enemies, not divided because of gender. While it’s obvious that women in tech are discriminated, alienating fellow victims, even if males, is not the answer to the problem.

Capital really won the class war…

The whole landscape of health trackers is depressing. I bought a fitbit last year as I could expend it at work, and I ended up leaving it in a drawer exactly for the uneasy feeling of sharing very sensitive data. Health data is probably the most impactful on personal lives (insurances, banks, etc.), and it’s astonishing to me how it’s too much to ask to a company that makes watches to have watches as their mine business model.

I understand sharing data for further analysis etc., but I should be able to use my health tracker locally, only talking to my phone app and nothing else, similar to how gadgetbridge works. I was eyeing banglejs specifically to be able to do this, even though it’s not really a health tracker.

Honestly it was not trivial, the custom emojis in the markdown parser seems to be vulnerable. Of course everything should be sanitized, but in practice there are cases where it’s hard to make a proper sanitization while retaining features to let users write weird stuff. This is not the case of “validate a username” that you know very well which regex to use and which character space.

I would actually say that this vulnerability should have been prevented using proper cookie security, which should make it impossible to steal the session via XSS.

I do acknowledge though that it’s not easy to take care of all of this when it’s 2 people working on everything (from design to frontend, passing for deployment etc.), especially if there are no specific competencies in appsec.

Blaming culture does not help with vulnerability disclosure. Vulnerabilities do happen and will happen again.

Writing a parser is not trivial and remember that it was a tiny project until a month ago.

I believe downvotes can be disabled at the instance level. (Small note)

That’s a LOT of changes. Kudos to all the people involved.